Trivia / Robot Jox

• Box Office Bomb: Though official reports stated the film had a budget of $10 million, the director has said it was actually $6.5 million. Either way, it did very poorly and grossed only $1.3 million.
• Executive Meddling/Writer Revolt: Zig-Zagged. Joe Haldeman and Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) had entirely different plots in mind while working on the movie.
  • Gordon wanted to make a campy flick about giant robots pounding the bolts out of each other.[1]
    Gordon: While there have been animated cartoons based on these giant robots, no one has ever attempted a live-action feature about them. It struck me that it was a natural fantasy for the big screen–and a terrific opportunity to take advantage of the special effects that are available today.
  • Haldeman wanted to make The Forever War with Humongous Mecha, focusing on the psychological stress of the jox being personally responsible for countless lives and in Achilles' case, deaths.
    Haldeman: I would try to change the science into something reasonable; Stuart would change it back to Saturday morning cartoon stuff. I tried to make believable, reasonable characters, and Stuart would insist on throwing in clichés and caricatures. It was especially annoying because it was a story about soldiers, and I was the only person around who'd ever been one.
• Inspiration for the Work: Director Stuart Gordon wanted to make the film because while there was plenty of animated fare to be held featuring giant robots, no one had tried to do it in live-action, and with the advances being made in special effects for cinema he wanted to be the one to make it happen.
• Referenced by...: The crowd screaming in the aftermath of the battle between Achilles and Alexander is sampled in Nine Inch Nails' song "The Becoming" from their album The Downward Spiral.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: It wasn't released until 1990 thanks to financial issues at Empire International, which wound up being bought out by Epic Productions and released under their name.
• Star-Derailing Role: This killed Gary Graham's career outside Alien Nation. Paul Koslo's career never picked up from this flop either before his retirement in 2004 and his death in 2019. Anne-Marie Johnson's career also died before it could start with this film, leading her to stick towards TV with In the Heat of the Night and In Living Color!
• Troubled Production: In addition to the Executive Meddling and Writer Revolt. Gordon said, "Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. There were sandstorms, flooding, and sets getting destroyed by winds. He wanted to shoot it outside. Normally, you shoot miniature work in a very controlled environment, but Dave had this idea that he wanted to shoot it against real skies, and real mountains, and really give this thing a sense of reality. Because of the sunlight, the Depth of Field was such that you could fool the eye."
• What Could Have Been:
  • A spinoff called Battle Jox was in the planning stages years later, but never saw development.
  • Originally, the plot was supposed to be an adaptation of The Iliad, with humongous robots, hence the protagonist's Nom de Guerre of Achilles. For the most part, the main remnant of the original premise is Achilles's robot getting a foot shot off.

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